The Swedes Choose Cattle for Stockholm’s Wetlands
Posted by jennifer, May 25th, 2009 - under Opinion.
Tags: Food & Farming
SWAMP, wetland, marsh, marshland, everglade - there are a variety of different names for wet areas covered in native vegetation and the specific mix of reeds, grasses, shrubs and trees will of course depend on how the areas is managed, including whether it is regularly burnt or grazed – or not.
I’m have never advocated a particular management regime. Indeed I support calls for fewer cattle in the Macquarie Marshes and more in the Redgum forest of the central Murray Valley.
Cattle will change the composition of the vegetation and keep an area more open and with fewer reed beds which is apparently why they are encouraged to graze the wetlands just outside of Stockholm.
The photograph of the red fox and a bull was taken just outside of Stockholm by Ann Novek.
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Notes and Links
Ann has two blogs at http://seaspy.bloggsida.se/ and http://annimal.bloggsida.se/
Find more information on foxes at http://www.canids.org/species/Vulpes_vulpes.htm
The colour of the fox varies in Sweden from greyish pale orange to dark red with black legs.
Click on the photograph of the fox and the bull for a much larger and much better view.
Ian – I now know where you come from. I’m really not interested in your financial dealings nor your family’s farm. I do know that the addition of my 2 children in 77 kept the Goonengerry school open when the others around it were being closed.
The land you inherited was grazed by dairy cows – 120 acres = 120 cows= cream to the buttery and skim milk to the pigs. Naru superphosphate kept it going. Once the Brits entered the EEC in 72 and no longer needed your butter your farms were ruined, and the whole family structure shattered.
funnily enough it was the Aquarius Festival in 72 that saved you.
I hope this makes it as I’m playing with linux
No, Janama, the land that I paid full market price for to my siblings grew Bananas with another 300 acres leased to migrant families and we grazed cattle on the remainder and gradually converted it to native forest.
When the two main industries declined we, along with many other land owners, had a vision of a landscape that was returned to the original wet schlerophyl mosaic that would be profitably managed for timber production in perpetuity. Some 75% of all wood that grows in a regrowth forest is of low quality. And while 3,000 or more young stems will grow on each hectare in a successful regeneration effort, there is room for only 100 mature trees/hectare at final harvest time. Nature decrees that 2,900 trees must be progressively removed to maintain the growth of the retained stems.
It is an incontestible fact of history that the green movement and the Wran Labor Government denied us access to that market on the basis of blatant falsehoods and unfounded fears for the safety of non-existent old growth forest. If we had gained access to that market for export woodchips the farms of the region would have had a viable alternative to subdivision into “prickle farms”. And there is not the slightest doubt that the early stages of the camphor laurel invasion would have found their way onto the trucks as well.
So you may well like to pat yourself on the back for saving a school from closure but it is small beer indeed compared to the dreadfull landscape consequences of the greens collective ignorance and entrenched negativity. So next time you take a drive through Upper Main Arm just slow down at the end of the bitumen, take a short drive up Mott’s Road (the one least travelled by) and reflect on the fact that the entire valley was bare pasture in the 1942 photograph, compulsorily cleared on pain of forfeiture of the land title. And then try and tell me that our path, not your’s, and not the Government’s, would not have made all the difference.
Ian, I was hand milking cows on my parent’s farm in SEQ in the late 40s, early 50s and all the district was devoid of trees to the tops of the steepest mountains causing all sorts of problems with breakaways, flooding and erosion.
Over the years I suggested to my children for life insurance purposes or a good investment, “there’s a few acres, go and plant some red cedars, maple, ash, silky oak etc, they grow like weeds [40 foot high in 10 years]“. My kids never did but it didn’t matter because today you can’t harvest those that did grow anyway.
Very good cases can be made for selective logging and 20 acre subdivision but no one’s listening.
Cohenite talks of the Great Pacific Climate Shift of ‘76 and I wonder if that accounts for logic as well as climate?
So you may well like to pat yourself on the back for saving a school from closure but it is small beer indeed
no Ian – I was pointing out that I was there, and had an influence, we all did, the “migrant families ” you refer to….. no doubt my friends.
We moved into your area and created a new economy and it’s now the most valuable real estate in rural NSW. I’m not sure what your problem is. There’s no way you’d make a living selling the trees you planted back in 72. My friend Stanley made a living extracting the fallin logs and slicing tree stumps for table tops, but timber farming in northern NSW is proving to be a Dodgy Bros venture – no one has ever thinned the Great Southern Plantation plantings around here and no one will.
Unless you can pour heaps of dollars to landscape your property in to some kind of idillic rainforest venture I’d sell out to someone who can.
Janama, the migrant families we leased land to had good Australian names like Neclario, Palasari, Nylund and Sing. There was a time when they could not legally own land, being non-british subjects, and my grandfather was a campaigner to extend property rights to include them. Unlike the people like yourself who came later, these people were never afraid of an opportunity disguised as hard work. They were the kind of people who were comforting to have around in a bushfire or flood. And they would never dream of taking something that did not belong to them.
And still, you just don’t get it. There are two reasons why timber farming in Northern NSW is not profitable. It is plantation based and that means high initial costs which cannot be recouped at realistic growth rates. A native regrowth based forestry model has much lower establishment costs, involves a gradual shift from grazing to forestry and the required growth rates are consistent with the climatic conditions.
The second reason why it is not profitable is the absence of a market for early thinnings. Early cash flow is absolutely critical to the profitability of any long term venture and woodchips for the pulp and paper value chain were, and remain, the only proven option. That is why no-one is likely to thin any of the Great Southern trash. And it is a matter of record that the greens and the Wran labor government destroyed the viability of any sort of significant forest restoration in the region by preventing this essential component.
And I point out, again, that if this capacity to export woodchips had been present over the past 33 years then it is an absolute certainty that we would not have any problem with Camphor laurels. You now have the environment you deserve.
And you now have a seriously unsustainable mix of high land prices that are completely detached from productive capacity in an economy that can only stay afloat with a hideous population growth rate that is rapidly destroying the very ecological values you claim to be protecting. I have not been to Byron Bay for more than a decade because it is such a terribly sad place. And while you and your green mates like to posture about preserving the so-called unique character there is absolutely no doubt that it is you and your kind who have completely f@#$% the place, big time.
You amputated the future of the original communities and then entrenched a culture of new age version of “Ponzi” property speculation that can only survive with an ever increasing horde of appetites.
And readers will have noticed how casually you dismiss the absolutely damning evidence that a fund manager cannot comply with both the community’s standards of prudent investment and allow a native forest to regenerate on any land, in any state. These are not just my own “financial dealings” as you put it because a fund manager’s standards of prudent investment are also the whole communities expectations of themselves. The greens and the Labor Party make Sooooh much of their determination to protect and repair the environment but it is they who have established an entire legal achitecture that actively prohibits the most contributive action of all, the expansion of native forest habitat onto previously cleared land.
And by the way, the “Oscar” of Oscar’s Road, along which you went from Huonbrook to Doon Doon was my maternal grandfather. Like spangles, cows were hand milked in a pastured landscape. And the reason why you can no longer use that road is because one of your new age mates put up unlawful keep out signs, encouraged rutting, weed infestation and treefall on the road and abused anyone who had the gall to exercise their legitimate rights of transit. The prices of land may well have gone up but the quality of the people took a serious dive.
Ian – you know nothing about my work ethic so stop speculating.
Ah – you’ve finally admitted there is a camphor laurel regrowth problem having denied it until now. Unfortunately native forest doesn’t regenerate automatically in the presence of camphor laurels that outgrow the natives and their roots poison the soil inhibiting regeneration of other species.
That’s just a load of bull and you know it. The area rapidly expanded because of it’s superb climate, magnificent beaches and lush rainforests. – it is recognised as the best climate in Australia as it rarely drops below 20C or rises above 30C.
Hasn’t stopped the banana, macadamia, coffee, stone fruit, blueberries, Kiwifruit, passionfruit growers and they appear to plowing along and expanding.
It’s plain from your total lack of knowledge of the area that you haven’t been there for 10 years. I’ve checked your land from Google Earth and it looks like a typical north coast block that’s been ignored for the past 30 years and is overrun with weeds.
As I said before – why not sell it to some one who may care for it, as you said yourself – the prices are high.